Jammu, June 7 -- Public anger has a strange way of finding symbols. Sometimes it gathers around a saintly figure in a white cap, sometimes around an unlikely political label that sounds almost like a joke until it begins to speak for a generation. The overwhelming response from Gen Z to the Cockroach party carries unmistakable echoes of Anna Hazare's anti-corruption agitation. Both emerged as vehicles for resentment against a system seen as remote, arrogant and morally exhausted. Both drew energy from people who felt that conventional politics had stopped listening. Both appeared, at least at the beginning, to be spontaneous uprisings rather than carefully manufactured political projects.

That similarity is important because it explains ...